Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people’s emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people’s emoti...

This study examines whether coding open answers in a picture-based test, as to the extent they reflect the fear of being laughed at (i.e., gelotophobia), demonstrates sufficient validity to construct a semi-projective test for the assessment of gelotophobia. Previous findings indicate that cartoon stimuli depicting laughter situations (i.e., in the pilot version of the Picture-Geloph; Ruch et a...

BACKGROUND The Control Preference Scale (CPS) is the most frequently used measure of patients' preferred roles in treatment decisions. We revised the original CPS and developed a new computerized patient self-administered version (eCPS). We used the eCPS to assess role preferences, and their determinants, in Italian and German people with multiple sclerosis (MS). METHODS New cartoons were pro...

Whether typical aging is associated with impairments in social understanding is a topic of critical importance in characterizing the changes that occur in older adulthood. Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to represent other's mental states, and has been tested in a variety of different paradigms in older adults. The overarching research question has been whether ToM abilities may rely...

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945), children were a major subject of propaganda images. Children had become significant figures in China when May Fourth intellectuals, influenced by evolutionary thinking, deemed “the child” as a central figure for the modernization of the country. Consequently, during the war, cartoonists employed alreadyestablished representations of childr...

This paper proposes a method for capturing the drawing style of cartoon from the original comic book. Given a concept drawing image of the specific comic book, our approach recovers not only the color scheme, but also the color ratio. The main technical contribution of this paper is a shading model capture and a stylized cartoon rendering. For the shading model capture, we collect RGB statistic...

For two cohorts of children from low- to moderate-income families, time-use diaries of television viewing were collected over 3 years (from ages 2-5 and 4-7 years, respectively), and tests of reading, math, receptive vocabulary, and school readiness were administered annually. Relations between viewing and performance were tested in path analyses with controls for home environment quality and p...